Join us for a panel on Friday, Nov. 3rd which analyses the difficult choices facing Andean leaders with the end of the commodities bonanza and looming economic austerity, and considers their implications for the survival of often precarious democracies. Please RSVP.

BRAM ACOSTA AT UBC

Hi everyone, thanks for coming and participating in the Public Talk and Workshop with Professor Abraham Acosta last week. We had a rich and stimulating discussion about important if perhaps under-studied events. We recorded the Public Talk for those who could not make it.

Stay tune for more events this and next term.

The Liu Institute’s Latin America and the Global Network invites you to Dr. Abraham Acosta public talk and a workshop. 

The public lecture open to the UBC community and the general public.The workshop is open to UBC graduate students and faculty. A light lunch will be served at both. Please RSVP.

“Social inclusion, participation and political legacies and in Latin America” 

Zaraí Toledo Orozco– “The State in Retreat: Private Governance and the Criminalization of Artisanal Mining”

Dominique Rumeau Castellazzi–  “Welfare States and Models of Capitalism in Latin America”

Eon Joung Lee – “Implementation of Participatory Budgeting: Lessons from Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and South Korea”  

Next week’s presenters are a group of political science Ph.D. students working on Latin America.

They will be talking about different but overlapping themes, ranging from obstacles to state development to the diffusion of participatory innovations in the region. Zaraí will look at the phenomenon of artisanal mining and discuss how private governance has assumed roles traditionally pertaining to the state. Dominique will question the theoretical assumptions of the Varieties of Capitalism literature and their value in explaining the evolution of regional welfare state structures.

Finally, Eon Joung will discuss the variation in the success of participatory budgeting initiatives in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and South Korea.

We are all looking forward to being engaged in fruitful discussion.

Come join us!

April 5th, 1-3 pm

Liu Institute, Boardroom.

PhD student Sara Escalante (SCARP) recently gave a remarkable talk about the needs of marginalized constituencies in the Latin American production of urban space. Her presentation, part of a larger collective project with Col·lectiu Punt 6, walked the audience through an urban audit commissioned by the city of Cali, Colombia. In explaining the specificities of place as an object always transversed by conflict, antagonistic interests and the hetero brilliantly analyzed by Michel Foucault, Sara produced a comprehensive reading of a city that poses every challenge for the planner; specially, for those who like Sara, are mindful of a multiplicity of microevents as experienced by groups -about whom designers usually give little thought: sexual minorities, sexual workers, slum dwellers, women, afro-colombians.

Sara’s voice in the context of a highly and thoroughly masculinized (and bureaucratized) profession such as Architecture and Urban Planning, was truly refreshing and stimulating in that it makes us uncomfortably aware of the dynamics of power (micro and otherwise) that still determine and oppress certain bodies in the urban space. In this sense, to approach a subject, a social problem, an issue from the methodological feminism exposed and espoused by Sara is to discover how the former can address not only explicit women’s concerns but those of the whole social fabric improving the city for all.

We look forward to hear about the city’s adoption of Sara and Col·lectiu’s recommendations.

Thank you all for attending.

And thank you Sara!